Month: April 2017

Since last time I have adjusted a lot of the animation. I started by animating the arms so that they move relatively smoothly, and the shoulders now move in the form opposite arm opposite leg. To give the rig shadows I added an area light to the scene, and toned down the intensity so that it didn’t overpower the scene.

I still need to research how to do an endless white background, but in the meantime I am using white planes. Also I need to look at the graph editor to make the transitions between poses more fluid, since the movement still feels a bit clunky.

Today in Ant’s lesson i continued working on my 2D game. The first thing that i did was create a system where if the player touches an enemy the level will restart. To get the code for this i watched the coding videos on the college moodle. As well as reacting to enemy collision, i also made it so that when the player reaches the goal (in this case the exit door) the collision will start the next level – i have yet to add anything to this level however.

After achieving this i decided to add projectiles to the enemies. Through a few scripts(‘autofire’, ‘projectile’), rigidbodies, and a bullet prefab, i managed to do so. The enemy chefs now throw knives, i like how the knives react to the environment – bouncing off walls/getting stuck. The level is also restarts when the player touches one of the knives.

As a side project for our Maya modelling lessons, we have been given the task of making some animations. We were given a list of different animations that we could attempt to do. From the list I decided to begin with a simple walk cycle.

Using one of the rigs – named ‘Jack’ – that we were given access to, I started working on the animation. This is what I have so far:

At the moment it is very rigid, so as I continue to work on this I will animate the arms so that they move fluidly. Also I think that I need to change the shoulders so that they move forward when the opposite leg moves.

When I am near the end of this animation, I will need to find out how to add an endless white background, adjust some of the movement, then render it out.

Today I finished the After Effects project that I have been working on. In the animation the character from Journey starts by landing on a statue in the desert (the very first level of the game). It then proceeds to jump and fall through a coloured gradient – representing all of the other levels – before landing on the final colour and knocking over the ‘y’ in ‘Journey’. Originally I was going to include a long ribbon which would light up with the game’s name, however time was short so I just used normal text instead.

I liked making this animation since Journey is an amazing game with beautiful scenery. I had some minor problems with the keyframes glitching out, and the most effective solution was to just delete the faulty ones and start over.

In our After Effects lesson with Pete, we were given a project to do. It is to do another animation – like the Harrison Ford one – in AE. The animation is allowed to be based on any character from a book, film, or videogame. What i decided to do was the character that the player controls in the game Journey.

In the animation the character will jump from a pillar and fall down through a gradient of colours (representing the different levels). Upon landing on the last level the ribbon (that grew during the fall) attached to him will light up and glow with the name of the game – Journey.

In our coding lesson we continued with our mini project, to make our own bouncy ball in Unity. Since we will be adding the whole class’s bouncy balls together i tested to see if the physics of mine worked properly. As shown below it reacts well to other balls by bouncing away upon collision.

When modelling my sci fi table i came across a problem. When i tried to extrude, the extrusion did not scale evenly, it was all wonky. To solve this, i found out that the box that appears when you extrude has an ‘offset‘ option. In that option box i typed the value 0.1 and it scaled it equally without fault.

I have added a buttons console and a lever to the low poly version of the table, here’s what it looks like so far:

In the high poly version i will add bumps and dents (baking down/mudbox), before adding a metallic texture.